Running a successful blog is difficult. Writing high-quality content and promoting it on social media takes time and dedication. So much so that it can often be at the expense of your blog’s overall user experience. Boosting the blog UX is essential when creating a blog with a loyal following. This article presents critical, quick, and easy ways to boost and improve the UX (user experience) of your blog.
It’s all very well being a top-notch content writer and promoter, but if your readers arrive at a low-quality site, they won’t stick around long enough for it all to matter. Boosting the blog’s user experience is crucial when creating a blog with a loyal following.
How To Boost Your Blog User Experience
1- Optimize Your Blog for Mobile Devices
It’s no secret that smartphone internet use has overtaken that of the desktop PC. 70% of all media content is now consumed on a handheld device, so there’s a good chance that most visitors are browsing your blog using a mobile phone or tablet. Smartphone users have notoriously low tolerance levels for websites that fail to display content correctly. Clinging to a badly optimized or outdated blog design will almost certainly cost you traffic.
Get Responsive: Go to a site like Responsinator and check how your blog displays on various mobile and tablet screen sizes. Next, go to Google’s free tool to check if your website meets mobile-first standards. If you don’t like what you see, you must find a new design. It may seem excessive and far from a “quick fix” way to boost your blog, but the time you invest upfront will pay dividends.
For owners of really old websites, it’s time to move over to something like WordPress, which makes implementing mobile-first design trivially easy. Though it’s still important to choose a good code, a premium theme from a reputable designer.
2- Improve Page Load Speed
Page load speed matters. With attention spans decreasing by the year and an increasing reliance on smartphone data plans, modern blogs need to be lightweight and fast-loading to keep users engaged.
You can check your blog’s loading time using sites like WebPageTest or Pingdom. These tests allow you to make informed decisions before settling on a new WordPress theme or website design. You’ll also be able to see which elements of your blog are hogging valuable resources, like overly large images and graphics, as well as clunky and unnecessary plugins and badly implemented caching services.
One often overlooked aspect of site loading times is bad-quality hosting, so research before paying out for space on a sluggish server is one of the quick ways to improve and boost your blog UX (user experience).
3- Simplify Your Blog’s Navigation
It’s well-known that drop-down menus with dozens of sub-menu items perform poorly on smartphones and tablets. Yet many blog owners are unaware that even desktop users find overly crowded menus confusing. As a result, you can use it to boost your blog user experience.
This all comes down to a phenomenon known as decision fatigue. When presented with too many menu options. Many users will ignore the menu entirely, returning to where they came from—usually their social media feed.
Indeed, the massive rise of social media has changed how modern internet users interact with websites. In the past, a user typed a search query, found a website, and then used the navigation menu to browse for further interesting information.
These days, a user is likelier to see something in a social media feed that piques their interest, click on it, get the information they were looking for, and then return to scrolling through their Facebook feed. That means it’s vital to keep navigation simple. If in doubt, stick with the “One Page, One Goal” mantra and learn how to funnel a reader toward a positive call to action.
4- Find and Fix Broken Links
Broken links create a terrible first impression. They badly impact your blog’s user experience, harm your search engine rankings, and ultimately cost you money. Even worse, you might have links on your blog that now lead to hacked websites and phishing scams.
Use a broken link checker to sift through your blog and fix any old or outdated links before they harm your reputation, which can boost and improve the UX (user experience) of your blog.
5- Make Your Blog Posts Easier to Read
Remember that short attention span issue? Modern internet users will run a mile when confronted with a wall of text.
It’s vitally important that your blog content isn’t formatted like an essay. Keep paragraphs short and break them up where possible with useful infographics and images. You can also use bullet points and lists to break up facts into easily digestible sections:
- Keep your line lengths to a maximum of 75 characters.
- Make sure your font sizes are legible: Aim for at least 16-18px.
- Use correct heading tags to make articles more readable.
6- Avoid Jargon and Industry Speak To Boost Blog User Experience
Unless you’re running a very niche blog, avoiding using corporate jargon is imperative. These are technical terms that are only used inside your specific industry.
Your writing should be clear, concise, and understandable to a regular reader with limited industry experience. If you’re in any doubt, adopt an easy-going, conversational tone, and try to be considerate to readers who might be intimidated by complex technical writing.
Understand Your Audience: Determine who you are writing to and how that might affect the style. The tone of your blog posts. This is also the cornerstone of good sales writing, so it’s a vital skill for a successful blogger to master.
7- Guide Users with Calls-to-Action
One of the most important things you can do to improve the user experience of your blog is to give clear calls to action throughout your content.
In an age of short attention spans, navigation menus are often ignored. It’s vital to subtly intersperse your writing with relevant links to other pieces of content and pages of your blog that might be of interest to your readers.
If you intend to include a call-to-action to fill out a form or download an info-product, be mindful of positioning: Pop-up banners are universally hated by users (and Google) and increasingly ineffective for growing an email list.
Placing calls-traction within or at the end of your content is much better from a user experience perspective; Your email sign-ups will almost certainly improve!
8- Don’t Ask Users for Too Much
About those sign-up forms: Keep them short and sweet. Never ask users for anything besides an email address if they sign up to download a free report. Every extra information you ask a user to submit will create friction. As a result, you will ultimately lose a subscriber.
Even contact forms should limit the necessary fields a user must fill in before sending them. You don’t need ten fields asking a user to give their full name, telephone number, or shoe size. Just ask for a contact address and a first name.
Suppose your site needs to comply with GDPR. This goes beyond a simple user experience perspective: You aren’t allowed to collect more data than is necessary.
Boost Your Blog User Experience Conclusion
Improving your website’s user experience can seem like a chore. Yet, with attention spans dropping and internet habits changing. So, ensuring your blog stays ahead of the curve is vital. So roll up your sleeves, start with the low-hanging fruit, and you’ll quickly improve user engagement and traffic! We hope this article with quick ways to boost and improve blog UX has helped you.
